


wonder woman

by novoaa1



Series: the misadventures of yelena danvers [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Middle School, POV Original Character, Racial slurs, Social Issues, carolnat's kid has a cruuuuuush, carolnat's kid is a badass, middle school boys being dicks, only one used, principal woodard being done with all of it, rated teen for mild language, we been knew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 14:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19814302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novoaa1/pseuds/novoaa1
Summary: Yelena punches another kid, middle school boys can be assholes, and Principal David Woodard is not having a good day.(He's not quite sure why he bothered to expect anything less.)





	wonder woman

**Author's Note:**

> less nat x carol heavy chapter, but i wanted to introduce yelena as her own sort of character and show how she's similar to nat and carol etc etc and just in general her personality when she's by herself
> 
> also please read the tags!! this bit deals with racial and social justice issues to some degree

Unfortunately, David doesn’t quite get his wish—he goes to therapy (wherein which he embarks upon an admittedly long-winded venting session to his rather lovely behavioral therapist Julie about a certain punch-happy 10-year-old girl and her terrifying mothers), endures a slight uptick in his ordinarily rather flat rate of wine consumed per evening (as dutifully observed by a decidedly amused Tom, that childish asshole); though, at the end of it all, he enjoys a quiet weekend at home (finally) wrapped snugly in Tom’s warm embrace with (you guessed it:) Enrique Granados’ Valses Poéticos playing gently on a shuffled repeat in the background. 

So, really, maybe it’s not so bad, after all.

On Monday morning, he wakes at 6:15am (as he always does) to plant a chaste kiss upon Tom’s pinkish lips before contentedly waving him goodbye as his adorable husband reverses one of their two shared vehicles out the compact driveway and continues onto his day job (working as a paralegal at one of New York’s leading law firms, Falcone & Harding); then, David sips his coffee and proceeds restfully through his morning routine, absentmindedly humming a current pop song he keeps hearing at the school's assemblies under his breath (FRIENDS by some guy who calls himself… Marshmello? Without a ‘w’??) until he realizes what he’s doing and promptly stops himself before it can go any further. 

All in all, it’s a typical morning—a _good_ morning, at that, and maybe David Woodard is merely too optimistic for his own good, but he strides onto school grounds at exactly 7:15am with the weight of his messenger bag only moderately heavy on his shoulder, feeling refreshed and entirely at ease with himself, with his job, with his _life_ , even whilst the foggy chill of the East Coast morning nips relentlessly at his cheeks. 

He straightens his Wonder Woman tie (another gift from an ever-thoughtful Tom), pats himself down once more to ensure that his phone is held securely in his left coat pocket (as it always is), and holds the door open for Ms. Miller, their lower school art teacher (she gives him a bright smile in return), on his way inside. 

And, as soon as the metal door shuts behind him with a rhythmic _click!_ , as soon as he feels the first (and strongest) wave of caffeine subsiding in his chest, as soon as he’s entering the school with a jovial smile upon his cheeks, what does he see?

Chaos. 

Anarchy. 

Utter pandemonium: students screaming shrilly and gathering into some sort of a American-football-esque huddle in the very center of the hallway, a low and rumbling chant of _“Fight! Fight! Fight!”_ echoing loudly from wall to wall, and, placed well within the indubitable core of it all (at 6’3”, David finds himself more than tall enough to easily peer over the hordes of screaming middle-schoolers and root out the origin of this maddening mobocracy), none other than Yelena Danvers straddling an upper grade boy at least three times her size upon the linoleum floors, screaming and hitting him with a morbidly impressive supply of iron-clad dedication and unadulterated aggression.

Immediately, Principal David Woodard feels a headache forming in his skull, a sort of all-too-familiar dread building in his gut—regrettably (and for the second time in less than a week), it looks as if the so-called 'simple life' just got a whole lot less simple. 

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“We meet again, Ms. Danvers,” he greets with an air of well-practiced diplomacy, carefully eyeing the girl in question seated squarely across from him and taking a sip of the lukewarm coffee in his Superman mug as something of an afterthought. 

Yelena Danvers (dressed in ripped slim-fitting blue jeans and a baggy graphic band tee) merely shrugs, leaning comfortably back in her chair as if she feels perfectly at home sitting on what many have dubbed the wrong side of the Principal’s desk—David feels a strange sense of déjà vu whilst he allows himself a moment to observe the girl's slouched yet confident pose, the hazelnut-hue of her wide brown eyes, the shoulder-length blonde hair that doesn’t appear to have been brushed in at least the last couple days… 

She’s the spitting image of her mother, David can see: an almost uncanny mirror image of the terrifying cosplay-obsessed fanatic of a woman who’d singlehandedly crumpled one of Xavier's few working school buses that remained (not even to _mention_ the fact that the paint job for all their educational vehicles had only just been redone at the beginning of the term). 

And, of course, there’s a bit of Mrs. Romanoff in her, too—the cautious sparkle in her eye, the certain effortless grace to her posture (even if she is “man-spreading,” as David understands the kids are now calling it, quite egregiously in her seat).

He isn’t sure whether to be intrigued or terrified. 

(In the end, he settles for a little bit of both.)

They sit in absolute silence for a few long moments, and, when Yelena stubbornly refuses to speak even long after the first period late bell has rung shrilly throughout the halls, David heaves a defeated sigh. 

“Are you going to tell me what happened, Yelena?”

She blinks, tilting her head slightly as she observes David with calculated disinterest. 

“I saw a problem, and I stepped in, just like my gut told me to. Mama says I should always listen to my gut, no matter what anyone else thinks,” she says eventually, her words measured beyond her years yet tinged with an indubitably childish undertone—a dizzying juxtaposition, above all else. 

(But, quite fitting, really.)

David fiddles indecisively with his Wonder Woman tie, knowing very well from his years of supervisory schooling that he can only take every middle-schooler’s words with a grain of salt at best—and, unfortunately, with the rather alarming growth rate of Yelena Danvers’ disciplinary file over the course of the semester (seriously, with how things were going, they’d be needing an additional folder for the child by the ides of next month), it seemed all the less likely that the short-tempered girl before him would bother telling him the truth to begin with. 

Still, he fixes a neutral expression onto his features and offers her a vaguely encouraging nod before asking, “And, what was the ‘problem’ that you saw?”

“Billy Jacobson showing his friends something bad on his phone,” she replies matter-of-factly, pert nose scrunched in distaste—even despite himself, David can’t help but find it altogether _adorable_. 

“Billy Jacobson, the 8th-grade boy you punched.”

“Yup.”

_Christ_. 

He takes another sip of bitter room-temperature coffee from his mug in an attempt to hide the flicker of sheer bewilderment that briefly overtakes his features—though, by the knowing glint in Yelena Danvers’ clever brown eyes and the slight quirk of her brow, he knows he doesn’t do all that well. 

“Um, I—Okay,” he carries on, pausing for a moment to clear his throat as he internally debates how in the _world_ he should go about handling… this. “What was Billy Jacobson showing his friends?”

Yelena huffs out a frustrated breath of air, the first sign of any real and discernible emotion he’s been presented with in the past five minutes—it only intrigues him further, the fire he sees burning in her gaze, the suddenly determined set to her jaw. 

“A picture of Abby Lee’s naked butt,” she tells him icily a second later, and David promptly chokes on nothing, desperate wheezes and gasps escaping him as he struggles valiantly for air. 

How—I—Wh— _What?_

“I—What?” he inelegantly sputters out before he can manage to come up with something even remotely coherent, a hot flush rising in his cheeks (again, he takes a brief moment to give thanks to whoever’s up there that his dark skin tone does well enough to hide it) at the altogether drastic turn this conversation has taken.

Yelena simply hums, apparently undeterred by his blatant real-life glitch (though he thinks that that might be putting it too nicely, all things considered), dark brows furrowed slightly over intense chocolate-brown eyes. 

“And her boobs, too.” David eyes bulge at that, his labored breaths only just beginning to return to a somewhat normal pace—Lord, he’s too gay for this. 

"They had some lame group chat going on where they were rating her body on a scale of 1-10,” she grumbles out angrily, then stops herself, a contemplative expression working its way onto her delicate features. 

“One of the idiot boys Corey gave her a 4, but I didn’t get that, ‘cause she’s super super beautiful, you know?” she rambles on, a dreamy look in her eyes, her tone rapidly losing its sense of urgency with every passing second. "Like, her hair looks _so_ soft, and her brown eyes look so _pretty_ when they sparkle, and I once heard her sing out on the recess field one day when she was all by herself, ‘cause I think she was sad, and it was, like… _magical_. I was gonna go and talk to her, ‘cause she started crying after that, but we aren’t friends even though I really really wanna be friends, so I was trying to come up with something to say that wouldn’t make me sound all dumb, but then the bell rang, and we had to go inside.” 

She pauses briefly, turning the full weight of her curious gaze upon a stock-still David sitting frozen in his seat. 

“They shouldn’t give her a 4, right? I mean, well, they shouldn’t give her numbers at _all_ , ‘cause Mommy told me that’s personificating her a—"

“Objectifying?” David corrects weakly, and she nods, giving him a winning smile that he reluctantly returns with a weak grin of his own. 

“Yeah! But, they did anyways, you know, and how come she got a 4?"

David just stares. 

“I would give her a billion thousand _billion_ , Mr. Woo-Dard,” she tells him seriously, and David’s eye twitches (though, at the all-too-familiar butchering of his last name, or at the sheer inanity of what’s happening at the current moment, he isn’t quite sure). “I think she’s the prettiest girl in the whole world.”

They sit in silence for another long moment. 

“R-R-Right,” David stutters out eventually, feeling rather out of sorts as he scrambles to redirect the disciplinary discussion this girl had so seamlessly derailed. “So, you—I—After th-this happened, you punched Billy?"

Yelena furrows her brow in confusion, shaking her head slightly as if suddenly remembering what she’d been called there for. 

“No, I didn’t punch him ’til later,” she replies dismissively after a spell, waving mindlessly in the air with a single hand—then, she stops herself in place, leaning slightly forward in her seat to fix David with an inquisitive look. "Should I have?” _What?_ "I mean, the number thing was kinda mean… "

“ _No!_ ” David blurts out, his voice little more than a squeak, then swallows thickly, willing his worryingly fast heart-rate to slow. “I mean, um—No. Violence is never the answer, Yelena.”

“Oh.”

David resists the urge to heave a long sigh. “Okay, so, what happened next?”

Yelena’s expression darkens slightly at the question, pink lips pursing tightly together, and David feels his gut churn with nauseating apprehension—because, this can’t _possibly_ get any worse… Can it? 

“Well, right after Corey said Abby’s body was a 4, Billy laughed and told him that was ‘way too generous,'” she informs him bitterly, making half-hearted air quotes with two small hands for the duration of the last three words. “Corey asked why, and Billy called her a… ‘chink’?” David’s blood runs cold—because, as it turns out, it can get worse… A _lot_ worse. 

“He said that chinks weren’t hot, and then he started doing this weird accent and making his eyes all squint-y. I don’t know what a ‘chink' is, but I was pretty sure he was trying to do the same accent as that boy Kai in my grade, the one who’s a S-change student—“

“Exchange,” David corrects quietly upon more of a reflex than anything else, and she frowns. 

“Es-change,” she sounds out slowly, her mouth struggling to form the words. 

“Close enough. You were saying?”

“Right! So, Billy was trying to do the same accent as Kai, who's from Taiwan. He didn’t do it very well, and it made my stomach feel all weird and wrong,” she recalls with a sour expression, and David finds himself nearly overcome with the powerful urge to wrap the young girl in a warm hug. 

(He’s beginning to have the rather belated realization that maybe, just maybe, things with Yelena Danvers aren’t quite what they seem. 

Aw, hell—who is he kidding? 

He’s now _entirely_ sure that things with Yelena Danvers aren’t at all what they seem.)

“And, when he made his eyes all squint-y, I think he was trying to make his eyes a different shape, like Kai’s. Plus, Abby has eyes like Kai’s, too, ‘cept I think hers are way prettier. So, I punched him,” she finishes decisively, an almost prideful edge to her tone, and David isn’t quite sure whether he wants to cry or scream. 

Because, this? This is far too detailed and elaborate to be make-believe, even if 10-year-old Yelena Danvers is parented by, quite possibly, two of the the most intimidating women David has ever met in his life. 

No, this is real. And ugly—ugly in a way that David had foolishly hoped he might never have to see again, because, this generation? They're supposed to be _better_. 

This generation has gay marriage legalized across the United States nation; they have transgender icons and LGBTQ+ celebrities who aren’t nearly as terrified to wear their respective truths for all to see, regardless of how outlandish they might seem; they had the first ever black POTUS, and increasingly diverse representation in the mainstream media that only grows more authentic by the year, and, above all else, an ever-expanding widespread culture that promotes acceptance above all else with a progressive sense of objectivity unlike anything the world has ever seen… 

And, yet, here they stand, upon the edge of a polarizing divide between races and genders and sexualities amongst all humankind, one that David often fears might never be truly eradicated. 

(It’s moments like these that only serve to make that sordid possibility all the more fear-inspiring.) 

“Hey, Mr. Woo-Dard?” Yelena asks then, brown eyes wide with childlike curiosity that nearly breaks his heart even as warmth blooms deep in his chest at the precious sight. 

He gives her a distracted nod in a mindless gesture to continue, his thoughts still racing at warp speed through his weary brain.

“What’s a ‘chink’?”

_Fuck_. 

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(Principal David Woodard hands out multiple light-blue detention slips that day to various disgruntled students at Xavier Middle, none of which have the name ‘Yelena Danvers’ scrawled neatly across the header. 

And if by the time the bell rings for the end of first block, there’s a blonde-haired 6th-grade girl in tattered blue jeans and a graphic band tee walking through the halls with a too-long Wonder Woman tie secured proudly around her tiny neck, well… no one can prove that David had anything to do with that.)

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**Author's Note:**

> again, i know there was no nat or carol in this, but i'm planning on the next installment (assuming i get some inspiration for it soon haha) having them anD yelena interacting so that's cool
> 
> let me know what you think? 
> 
> aaaaand thanks for reading:)
> 
> (my [tumblr](https://psyches.co.vu/))


End file.
